You can cultivate a winning attitude even with a losing hand.
Your Self Image is who you see yourself as being now; your Ideal Self is the person you aspire to be. The gap between our Self Image and our Ideal Self is a key to understanding Self Esteem. If there is no significant gap, or you are closing the gap, between your Self Image and your Ideal Self, then you will tend to feel good about yourself. This will increase your Self Esteem. If you are not living up to your Ideal Self, resulting in a significant gap between how you see yourself and how you would like to be, you will tend to feel bad about yourself. This will lower your Self Esteem.
How would you like to be? What type of person can you become? Who do you most admire? These are some of the key questions that drive our vision of the Ideal Self. Our aspiration to become our Ideal Self shapes who and what we become. If we have a limited Ideal Self, then the life we build for ourselves will be limited too. Yet, ironically, we might have high Self Esteem, because we will find it easier to live up to the standards we have set for ourselves. Since, in this case, there will not be a significant gap between our Self Image and our Ideal Self, we are close to being who we want to be, and our Self Esteem will be high. Eventually, however, we may become discontented and aspire to become something more.
You might be limiting yourself by thinking of yourself in terms of what you do, rather than who you are.
In our formative years, others likely offered up possibilities for our Self Image. Some of those images may be positive and helpful, while others may be detrimental.. We might have been told, “You’re good at sports,” or the opposite, “You’re not good at sports.” People may have told us, “You are a great cook,” or, conversely, “You are not a good cook.” If we accept such comments as true, we tend to incorporate them into our sense of self until they are challenged and changed. However, if these types of comments are about what we do, rather than who we are. This can cause us to lead our conversations, and even our lives, from the limited perspective of what we do, rather than who we are. We may be tempted to describe ourselves and think of ourselves only as “I am an engineer,” “I am a businessperson,” “I am a therapist,” and so on, because these roles have become part of our Self-Image and possibly also part of our ideal self. If we play out our chosen roles in life effectively and those roles are part of our Ideal Self, it bolsters our Self Esteem. However, if we struggle in these roles, we will also struggle with our Self Esteem.
We might even describe who we are in terms of some significant challenges we have faced in life, “I am an abuse survivor.”, “I am a recovering alcoholic.”, “I am a recovering food addict.”. I used to describe myself playfully as a “recovering nerd,” since I was in such a nerdy job.
Our gender, and especially whether or not we are at peace with it, fundamentally shapes our sense of self.
The key here is whether we can rise above our lived experience and not allow the opinions, prejudices, and ignorance of others to distort our self-image and ideal self, causing us unnecessary conflict with our natural self. This type of inner conflict can be particularly intense when it comes to gender issues.
Our gender strongly impacts our sense of self. This is not only in terms of our gender, as “male”, “female”, “non-binary”, or whatever, but also in the sense of whether or not we are at peace with our gender identity. If we are at peace with our gender, that would be a constructive aspect of our Self-Image; if our sense of gender (and the roles that come with it) is a source of pain and struggle, then that too can become part of our Self-Image. In such cases, we might see ourselves as victims of circumstances and as misunderstood, abused, or worse. We might build our Self-Image around being someone with painful or even inescapable life issues, and hence develop our sense of identity around that. If we can manage to do so, it is better to build our Self Image as someone who is overcoming our issues, or at least coping with them, rather than being victim of them. This opens us to tapping into inner strengths and resilience that might otherwise lie dormant. Becoming able to rise above our previous experiences and reframe our sense of identity from within can help save us from much of that inner conflict.
Your Self Esteem is not so much about the cards that life deals you, but how you play the game.
By becoming self-determining and taking responsibility for our Self Image and our Ideal Self, we can reduce our suffering and build our Self Esteem. Whatever our struggles, if we can find something ennobling and uplifting to aim for, even amid those struggles, this gives us the basis for healthy Self Esteem. Our Self Esteem is not so much about the cards life deals us, but how we play the game with what we have. We can cultivate a winning attitude even with a losing hand.
Our Ideal Self is often shaped by what we see in others and what we would like to emulate. Yet, having heroes can be a mixed blessing if they are too far ahead of what is within our reach and we try to emulate them. Two of my heroes from my late teens were Jimi Hendrix and Carl Jung. Although I haven’t tried to emulate Jung, I did attempt to imitate Hendrix in some small ways. It took years of practice before I could play a guitar riff that even approached what Hendrix seemed to do effortlessly, and for a while, that was disheartening. I had set the bar too high by choosing him as my hero, in the sense of wanting to be able to copy him. Later, I picked some less dramatically brilliant guitar players to copy. That worked better and even gave me a better understanding of what Hendrix was doing. However, I had realised by then that being a guitar hero was not my path and not truly part of my Ideal Self.
We need to pick our “heroes” carefully. When I was around twelve, I moved to a new school for older kids. I noticed a group of boys who all hung out together and tried to project the “tough guy” image. I watched them from a distance for a while, to see if that was something I wanted to do. I was small and slightly built, so being tougher had some appeal. Yet, as I watched these boys, I could see that they were not a happy bunch. They were bullies and not even competent ones at that. When there was no suitable target outside of their group to try to make miserable, they would look for ways to make each other miserable. I realised that they rarely, if ever, smiled genuinely, and I decided I would rather be happy than “tough”. Much later, I got into weight training and martial arts, which turned out to be better ways to toughen myself up.
All going well, life becomes a fulfilling process of moving our Self Image towards becoming our Ideal Self, as long as our Ideal Self does not become too unreachable. As we navigate life, we try on different roles and types of behavior, and, if we are wise, we discard those that no longer serve us.